Wednesday, 28 August 2013

Frightfest 2013

as you may or may not already know, me and my sister are currently recovering from a long bank holiday weekend at Frightfest - a four day horror movie festival at Empire Leicester Square. it's become a yearly tradition of ours to go and watch as many horror movies as possible in four days (we are both pretty big horror fans) and this year I thought I'd post a brief overview of a few of my favourites that we watched over the past four days in case any of you lovely people are horror movie buffs too!

- V/H/S 2 - we actually saw the first V/H/S at Frightfest the other year, and we both absolutely loved it. it's basically a compilation of short movies that are supposed to be 'found footage' of bizarre occurences. I think we both ended up preferring the second V/H/S to the first, and I just really hope they make more of them as I love the concept of getting different film makers to make shorts and then just joining them together with an overall story. the subject matter of each short is so varied, which makes it even more enjoyable - like watching four horror movies in one!

- The Grief Tourist - we weren't actually going to watch this, but we had a long gap between films, and decided we'd squeeze this one in rather than sitting around and falling asleep! I'm so glad we did as it ended up being one of my favourites of the whole festival. it follows a man visiting places where famous serial killers lived/worked/killed and shows the unravelling of his mind as he becomes increasingly obsessed with one particular killer. the downward spiral reminded me of those central to many of Aaronofsky's films, with the lead character in The Grief Tourist eventually being revealed as a serial killer too. beautifully shot, and utterly compelling to watch.

- Big Bad Wolves - the directors of this film premiered another of their films at Frightfest a few years ago called Rabies, which me and my sister watched and really enjoyed, so we knew we had to see Big Bad Wolves. full of dark humour, even whilst dealing with a subject as sensitive as pedophilia, the film built up perfectly until the final climactic scene, with a twist I didn't guess (I'm awful at guessing plot twists at the start of a film thus ruining the rest of it!)

- Contracted - an unknown STI infects a host, slowly turning her into what can only be described as some sort of zombie. it follows the main character from the moment of infection, showing her physical and mental deterioration as she tries to keep the truth of what is happening to her a secret from her friends and family. although I found it ever so slightly predictable, what I loved most about this film were the moments of gore - not gore like you see in slasher movies, or zombie movies, where it's all missing limbs and entrails being removed. but gore more like you see on real life medical shows. there is a moment where she realises one of her fingernails has gone black, and she is able to just lift it off her finger (with a lot of pus involved of course.) for me that is worse than any amount of decapitation or slicing and dicing!

did anyone else go to Frightfest this year? if you love horror and live in/near London then I'd definitely recommend going next year - you can buy single tickets for individual films, so you can watch one film or thirty, depending on how much you can stomach!